Witch-Blood by Ash Fitzsimmons

Author:Ash Fitzsimmons [Fitzsimmons, Ash]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ash Fitzsimmons
Published: 2018-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

I’m not going to say that the day I spent being bumped around in Astrid’s pocket was the strangest of my life, but no matter what happens to me in the future, it’ll probably remain in the top five.

Unless you’re riding in a pocket, you don’t think about how much your clothing moves when you walk, especially something like an apron, which shifts with every step. The particular pocket in which we’d landed hit Astrid at mid-thigh, making our ride feel kind of like a hammock from hell. Adding to the general misery were the fact that Joey and I couldn’t really talk—we didn’t want to draw attention to Astrid with mysterious squeaking—and the disorienting task of trying to figure out where we were in the palace by smell and sound alone. The latter was easier to work around, since Astrid spent most of her time in the kitchen. Mercifully, she stopped by the counter at one point to peel and core the fruit she’d picked that morning. Every so often, her hand would slip into her pocket and drop a few crumbs for us—a bite of apple, a sliver of ham, a crust of bread—and so Joey and I passed the time by gorging ourselves. In retrospect, this might not have been the brightest idea we’d ever had, since a swaying apron and a full stomach don’t exactly mix, but we held it together and even managed to doze in shifts.

For her part, Astrid went about her day as if nothing were out of the ordinary. She spoke little but did so politely, making herself as inconspicuous as possible. I heard unfamiliar voices laughing a few times—Oberon’s people almost certainly—but Astrid said nothing to them, and they paid her no attention.

As the hours passed, Astrid moved back and forth between the kitchen and the dining rooms until the night grew late and she finished her work. Joey and I bumped along as she walked upstairs to her quarters, and then, after a large jostle, the movement stopped. He started crawling over to me in the dark, but before we could speculate together, Astrid’s eyes appeared at the top of our pouch. “I’m going to bed,” she whispered. “You’re on a hook on the back of my door for the moment. We’ll wait for the palace to quiet before we do this, so try to get some sleep.”

At a loss for a better idea, Joey and I divvied up the last of the food and stretched out, making ourselves as comfortable as we could. I know I dozed off, because when I opened my eyes again, it was still pitch-black, but we were moving once more. Joey reached out and squeezed my arm, offering reassurance in the darkness, and I fumbled until I made contact with his shoulder. It would be all right, I repeated to myself. All we had to do was drag Coileán out of bed and through a gate. Piece of cake. We didn’t even have our backpacks to slow us down.

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